Most of this weekend I’ve spent catching up: with new movies, with balancing my checkbook, with getting my book review posts written, with getting my tallies of new books purchased tallied, and such.

Friday night, spazzkat, solarbird, jennygriffee, and I all went to see Zombieland, which was highly entertaining. It’s a different flavor of funny than Shaun of the Dead, but definitely a solid competitor in the realm of zombie comedies. Look for the clever integration of main character Columbus’ Rules for Surviving Zombieland into the action, in particular. Everybody in the cast is excellent, especially Woody Harrelson for my money, and there’s a great cameo in the middle of the movie that I will not identify. ;)

Yesterday went pretty much entirely to balancing the checkbook and discovering that we had six hundred more dollars than I thought we did, because I’d accidentally subtracted a previous deposit when I should have added it. This, my children, is why Mama Anna always balances the checkbook. It’s like finding free money! (Only, well, not, because I need to throw it at the VISA, but hey!)

And after I finished balancing the checkbook, I started writing a bunch of book review posts. I’m almost done getting caught up on those and have three more to go; I’ve scheduled a bunch of them to go live through the rest of this week, one per day, so as not to overwhelm y’all with the wave of reviews. I’m caught up through seanan_mcguire’s Rosemary and Rue, and am now pondering exactly what I want to say about the Castle tie-in novel, Heat Wave! (I will be doing the review in-character; if ABC can make this joke, what the hell, I’ll play along.)

Today, it’s all about the books. I’ve done another round of ebook buying off of Fictionwise as well as via the ongoing Drollerie sale, and I’ve picked up three new paperbacks from Third Place and one from Barnes and Noble too. Here’s the tally:

Physical Books

Boneshaker, by cmpriest (purchased before seeing the movie on Friday, which seemed apt–buying a book involving zombies before seeing a movie involving them!)

And five, count ‘em, five super-cheap Harlequin Suspense novels by Jessica Andersen, because I discovered that one of hers I was already reading was #6 in a series, so I was really kinda lost. But I like her writing anyway, so it’s all good!

Which brings me to a grand total of (drum roll)… 19 in this wave of purchasing, and the grand total for the year to 120. I’m currently at 87 books read for the year, with books 88 and 89 in progress. So it’s safe to say that the chances of my finishing the year with having purchased more books than I’ll have read are very, very high! But it’ll be fun to see if I make 120 books read by then.

Friday night mamishka, jennygriffee, kathrynt, llachglin, and Q & Erik’s little girl Lillian all came over to the Murk to play Beatles Rock Band. This was great fun, and I can say this even despite the fact that I never actually participated–since Lillian kept me busy babywrangling. I had enough of a delightful time just periodically popping to see what everyone else was doing, and I gotta admit, the music was awesome. Meanwhile, as always, Lily was a delight. This time around the kid pulled every object in her mother’s backpack out and explained to me very earnestly what each thing was and what it was for. She made particular note of how the “special drink” had strawberries in it, and the juice boxes had apples. Good choices, kid. ;)

I am in fact thoroughly songvirused now by various Beatles songs, and expressed my interest in not only checking out the game but in giving Beatles albums a proper listen. This amused spazzkat, who pointed out that, as an Elvis fan, am I not contractually obligated to dislike the Beatles? I replied that he had invited them to be the second, third, fourth, and fifth Elvises, after they’d offered to make him the honorary fifth Beatle. ;> (And apparently they actually visited him at Graceland, back in the day, and they hung out and jammed for about an hour. God, if only recordings had been made of what they were doing. Those recordings could be worth the price of a small country!)

More seriously, though–I actually haven’t ever given a proper listen to any Beatles albums. I know of various songs of theirs, sure; you can’t have grown up in the Western hemisphere and not know of most Beatles songs. But I’ve got to rectify this deficit in my musical experience. Commentary on favorite albums is therefore welcome.

Saturday evening, solarbird and I ambled over to the Wayward to listen to vixyish, tfabris, and solcita perform for the Sereniversary, and that was fun. I actually had to sit at the front of the cafe and couldn’t see anything from back there, but it was all good; I could still hear plenty well, and I had the opportunity for some lovely conversation about phones and other portable devices, not to mention Patricia Briggs’ books. Bonus points as well for getting a chance to make Sunnie squeal at the picture of The Doyle With Beard on my iPhone.

Sunday by comparison was comparatively quiet, aside from the whole getting a sneak peek of the cover art for the forthcoming anthology I’m going to be in (and I did I mention, AWESOME?). And it’ll probably surprise none of you that I picked up quite a few more ebooks. It’s all Fictionwise’s fault! This is what happens when they offer me a big ol’ rebate on a book that pretty much means I get four books for the price of a hardcover. And then they go and extend a coupon I’d previously used. They keep this up, they’re definitely going to keep on getting my business.

And here’s what I’ve picked up from them now, bringing my total purchased books for the year up to 95:

Dead and Gone, by Charlaine Harris, pre-empting my need to read it as a library book

Staying Dead, by suricattus, replacing the paperback I’d re-sold to Third Place

First Truth, by Dawn Cook, ditto

Norse Code, by Greg Van Eekhout, since I’d heard a lot of good things about this

Folly, by Laurie King, since I’d wanted to read this for a while

Touchstone, by Laurie King, since I like her work in general

And last but not least, pre-ordered to be downloaded tomorrow, Heat Wave. By Richard Castle. Because I am still laughing and laughing and laughing that ABC is actually putting out a book with Castle’s name on it, and doubly so that whoever’s writing the Twitter feed has urged followers to help the book beat Dan Brown on the bestseller list.

For that cause alone, they could have written 400 pages of “badger badger badger badger mushroom”, and I’d have leapt right on it! I’m going to look forward to reviewing this one, entirely in-character. They’re going to pull this joke, I’m going to play along!

mamishka came over this afternoon, and we had a delightful time getting her laptop updated to Snow Leopard (plus the .1 update) while watching the first two hours of the BBC version of State of Play. I really liked that, and it’s quite nice how the US version did a decent job of preserving the bones of the plot while condensing it down to two hours. John Simm is easily a match for my beloved Mr. Crowe, I’ll totally grant–plus, the BBC version has David Morrisey, who I’d first seen being awesome in the last Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Next Doctor”. It’s quite cool to see him in something else.

Meanwhile, I have made my first ebook purchase inspired by my recently joining the Outer Alliance: a short work called Rot by Michele Lee. It’s a zombie work, and it adds an extra level of tension by making the zombies still sentient while their bodies are rotting around them. You can check out the Outer Alliance’s spotlight post on Michele here, and her own page about the work here.

In addition, I’ve picked up copies of Treason’s Harbour and The Far Side of the World, since I needed those to continue the Patrick O’Brian goodness. Y’all may remember I listened to an audio version of Treason’s Harbour already, but I didn’t have a physical copy yet. Very much looking forward to reading The Far Side of the World, too!

I have issues with the 3.1 iPhone OS update: namely, it’s totally broken Smart Playlists. All of my Smart Playlists on my device are displaying out of order, although they’re fine in iTunes on my computer. So to get around this, I’ve started listening to a lot of my stuff via album view or via the podcasts view. As a consequence, I’ve been stricken with an urge to just listen to my entire collection in alphabetical order, just because I haven’t listened to quite a bit of this stuff in quite a bit of time. Still working my way through the A’s. I think I’ll do a summary post when I’m done with each letter.

And, last but not least, speaking of music, the Murkworks now has Beatles Rock Band. We played it some Friday night and it was highly entertaining, and a Beatles Rock Band gathering at our house is highly likely next weekend. We need more mikes to properly do the harmonies. And I am totally requiring some Beatles in my iTunes collection now.

Captain Jack Harkness is very lucky that the Doctor’s last few regenerations have been younger and hotter–or else very unlucky, depending on your point of view, because he’d have had entirely different interactions with oh, say, the First Doctor.

What with solarbird being out of town this weekend, I’ve taken it upon myself to have some quiet me time, which I really rather needed. Just getting caught up on my sleep is a win. But so is doing various and sundry small chores and errands that needed doing, such as getting the checkbook caught up, buying reflective red tape to go over the broken lens on our right rear taillight*, picking up some more long and therefore work-appropriate shorts to wear to work as well as some badly needed sports bras, and washing clothes and sheets and towels.

Friday night we had all the Bothell crowd as well as jennygriffee come over for more tabletop gaming, and while that was quite hectic, it was also fun. I continue to be full of Win for little Moira and Lillian, and this time around I also got little William’s attention; the boy thought it was great fun to try to help me play my guitar. He’s shyer than the girls and doesn’t talk nearly as much, so it was pretty neat to see him perk up.

Lily and Moira love going up our stairs and peeking in my bedroom because I have a big bed they can bounce on, and also, we have a cache of stuffed animals in there. But they also love making me (as well as any other convenient grownups) chase them in circles around the main floor of the house. Lily in particular commanded me to “be a dinosaur!”, so I apparently need to get right to work on my T-rex impersonation. Meanwhile, Moira wanted to further investigate our DVD collection, and when she spotted the pink boxes that contain our Cardcaptor Sakura anime episodes, I went ahead and let her watch that figuring that it wouldn’t be too scary for her or Lily. kathrynt tells me that Lily in fact is experimenting with being scared, and likes to identify things as “scary”.

This led to one of the cutest things I’ve heard coming out of a two-year-old mouth lately: “scary toilet paper lady” to describe the antagonist character in the movie I showed them. Hee.

And, Moira insisted that I “protect” her while she was watching the movie, and sat in my lap. Aw. <3

It should also be noted that Lily furthermore kept asking me for "Donkey Riding", and when she spotted the background pic of Great Big Sea on my computer, pointed at it and said "that's a picture of Donkey Riding!" She's still a little shaky on which name goes with the band and which name goes with the song, but she clearly now knows the faces of Great Big Sea when she sees them. Mostly. She also thought Eddie Izzard on my T-shirt was Sean, I think. I put her straight!

Yesterday morning Q then IMed me to tell me that Lily told her "we put on shoes and go over to my Anna's house!" I am apparently now Lillian's Anna! Who knew?

Unrelatedly, last night while working on checkbook balancing, I re-watched TOS's "Doomsday Machine" episode (some awesome mileage of The Kirk), Master and Commander (which I think is now well and solidly my favorite Russell Crowe movie Ever), and another 4th season episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which is still bringing the wacky).

* Why the hell can’t I buy just a replacement lens for that taillight, anyway? The light itself is intact, it’s just the outer lower bit of the lens that’s broken. But according to the guys at Schuck’s the assembly is all they have, and they wanted $130 for it. I bought a $5 roll of reflective red headlight repair tape instead and used that. Which should do me for now and hopefully satisfy the next cop that tries to pull me over for having a broken taillight.

And because of this, I’m going to try to post about assorted Things That Don’t Suck.

This past weekend: Street Fair. Got to go with solarbird, and I got a new hat, and Dara bought several cute things to wear, and Tasty Food was eaten as well. Got to see mamishka as well as assorted other folks I know from online and the local filking crowd, vixyish and gfish and hsifyppah and tereshkova2001.

Also this past weekend: Starting to watch Season 2 of Life on Mars. This show is made entirely of Awesome, and I am sad that there are only two seasons of it, because next time I see the Master on the Doctor he totally will be DI Tyler instead. And that’ll be just plain weird.

Yesterday: Lots of new music purchased, including Carbon Leaf’s shiny brand new album, Nothing Rhymes With Woman. More thoughts on this will be forthcoming. Also, as a special side note to seimaisin, I must note I’ve also picked up Gaelic Storm’s second and third albums, and lo, there is Awesomeness. I am particularly amused that GS covers a song I was originally introduced to by Heather Alexander: “South Australia”. Seriously, though–GS clearly got their shit together as of album #2, because their vocals are a lot stronger, and I’m finding both the second and third albums actively groovy.

And oh yes: it totally fails to suck that I found an lj user tag parser for Wordpress, so even though I’m doing a lot of crossposting out of Wordpress these days, I can still do lj style tags. Because it totally messes me up when I can’t!

Now that fourth season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea has finally come out on DVD, I have leapt gleefully upon it... and have been reminded that oh my yes, this show got just mental by the last season. I had a small number of them on videotape thanks to a kind fan who sent me a bunch of tapes ages ago before it was on DVD, and some of those were from fourth season. I remembered a few others from that era too, from when I watched 'em as a kid.

But really, I wasn't at all prepared for re-watching them on DVD. 'Cause I mean, holy crap, people, Vincent Price and his marauding puppet army taking over the Seaview! This is almost good as Giant Whale + Atomic Bomb = OTP from Season 2! It even got spazzkat's attention and made him sit down and watch the episode along with solarbird and me.

Interesting trends of the episodes watched include:

- Frequent kicking of Captain Crane's ass; in fact, two of the four episodes I've watched involve Crane being unconscious for most of the episode. Curiosity leads one to wonder what Hedison was up to in late 1967 that his character had to be out of it for most of those two episodes!

- I've spotted at least two non-white crewmembers in these episodes, one of which had actual speaking lines. Ha, somebody must have been realizing they should vary things up a bit on the lily-white crew. Good!

Also among the highlights thus far:

"Fires of Death" - Episode 1 in the set, featuring the Seaview trying to stop a massive volcanic eruption that threatens to destroy half the planet, only OHNOEZ! There's a batshit alchemist on board who wants to harvest the eruption for the elixir stones that keep him immortal!

"The Deadly Dolls" - The Vincent Price episode. Oh man, this had everything. Attempt to take over the Seaview! Evil puppets! A monster FROM THE FUTURE! Crane in the air vents! Shooting a charge through the hull! Swapping out most of the crew for evil dopplegangers! And VINCENT PRICE, people!

"Fatal Cargo" - Not nearly as batshit an episode as the previous two, but it does amusingly feature a "white gorilla" on the rampage on the sub--a "white gorilla" that fans of Star Trek will recognize as the "mugato" from "A Private Little War". I knew there was some overlap of actors between the two shows, but I didn't know they were overlapping monster costumes too!

"Rescue" - This by far is the least batshit of the episodes I've watched so far, and is almost on Season 2 levels of coherence. OHNOEZ! Crane's trapped on the bottom on the flying sub and running out of air and there's a saboteur on board the sub who wants to keep the Seaview from getting to him in time!

And now, some stats!

Number of episodes involving:

Crane getting his ass kicked: 2

Crane getting his ass kicked by puppets: 1

Crane in the air vents: 1

A monster on the loose in the sub: 1

Mind control of one or more members of the crew: 1

Transformation of one or more members of the crew: 1

Batshit "scientist" as the villain of the episode: 1

Game of "Spot the saboteur" (hint: it's the new member of the crew you've never seen before!): 1

Fighting off the monster of the episode by sending a charge through the hull: 1

I didn't post about BSG last week, but that's kind of okay given that we've just had ourselves a big ol' explosive two-parter. So it's more or less appropriate that I'm covering them both in one big post.

Picothoughts: No overall surprises with how this plot played out, but one or two very specific surprises along the way. Also, one big moment of "oh for frak's sake".

So I'd posted earlier about winning myself an ARC of Jessica Andersen's Dawnkeepers. This book finally showed up in the mail on Tuesday--two weeks after the book actually came out, so it's less an ARC and more an RC at this point. But I emailed her nonetheless to let her know that it had safely arrived and that I'd bumped it up to the top of my reading queue.

I also pointed her here so that she could see examples of my book review posts, and she came over and read a post or two, and then flung me more mail in delight--because she too is a Battlestar fan, and we were mutually very pleased to discover that we both could geek about this show for hours.

In the process of this she flung me a very interesting little theory that I must now share with you all!

Of course, it couldn't be anything BUT grim coming back from that last cliffhanger, now could it? But I gotta say, tonight's episode delivered the grim in spades, and we are definitely upholding the principle of not so much enjoying Battlestar as surviving Battlestar.

... clearly, it is time to choose the nickname of the Eleventh Doctor! The new boy is joining the ranks of First Doctor, Shemp Doctor, Fop Doctor, Scarf Doctor, Celery Doctor, Most Hated Doctor, Scottish Doctor, FOX Doctor, Ears Doctor, and Geek Doctor. What shall we call him? What say you all?

Meanwhile, for giggles and grins, check this out. It's a fake fan trailer for a Thundercats movie--and it's surprisingly well done! I'd actually think about going to see this movie if it really existed.

Longest Night has started here at the Murkworks, and it'll just be me and solarbird tonight, pretty much. Friends came by this afternoon to say hi and drop off a few small gifts, much appreciated, although they had to go ahead and scamper off for shelter ahead of the muck we've had rolling up from the south.

I expect tonight to be fairly low-key. Unless the wind does actually pick up and we lose power, in which case Dara and I will be hanging out in the living room by the gas fireplace, possibly playing instruments. Until then, though, it'll be a lot of just peering out the window every so often to see how the snow is progressing.

Last night we watched some old Star Trek in honor of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, and in particular, the first season TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Nurse Chapel did have an unfortunate habit of falling in love with guys with brains like computers, didn't she?

Tonight, I may have to break out 3:10 to Yuma. Mr. Bale and Mr. Crowe can do their part to help keep me awake.

Happy longest night of the year to you all, and here's to the sun coming back tomorrow morning in so much as it can with Snowpocalypse Round 2 upon us!

For those of you who aren't already watching them, the BSG site is now running another series of 10 webisodes. These ones feature Gaeta and two of the Eights. Episodes 1-3 are now posted.

Also, they have a trailer up for Caprica, which will be premiering in 2010. Possible point of interest in that trailer seems to be the rise of the technology that gave us the humanoid Cylons, so yeah, I'll be at least giving that a glance when it comes out.

After all the whiplash in the forecast yesterday, we're still holding steady with the expected Big Cold this weekend. And now it's finally actually snowing in Kenmore. Not a stunning amount yet, but it's heavier than a flurry. So it'll be interesting to see if this keeps up.

Have had a delightful and restful day. Went off to have a chiro appointment and a checkup with my doctor; I've had to have her prescribe me some Allegra on the grounds that I suspect I may be harboring a mild allergy to the cats. This isn't a serious allergy, mind you, but just enough itchy eyes and sneezing going on to make me wonder if something's up. And Fred and George have been the only real alteration to our environment over the last year or so.

It's weird. This is certainly not the first time I've lived with multiple cats, but it's been the first time I've lived with two that are as fluffy as the boys are. And since I like them, I'm hoping the Allegra will manage this issue.

So far this afternoon my eyes have been noticeably less itchy, so this so far seems to be a win.

And for extra bonus Win, mamishka came over to hang out just before she heads East for the winter. We MUSH-geeked a bit; I'm not MUSHing anymore but I still appreciate Meems telling me about her adventures on Star Wars MUSH. And we watched the pilot of Due South just because I've been highly enjoying that and Meems hadn't seen it before. She and spazzkat went at it in Rock Band, then.

Looking forward to a relaxing evening, too. solarbird should be home soon from her Norwescon concom, and there will be pizza. <3